30 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
shorten this to Kib—Dunsany’s giver of life 
upon the earth. 
My heart’s desire is to run on and tell many 
paragraphs of Kib; but that, as I have said, 
would be bad taste, which is one form of immo- 
rality. For in such things sentiment runs too 
closely parallel to sentimentality,—moderation 
becomes maudlinism,—and one enters the caste 
of those who tell anecdotes of children, and the 
latest symptoms of their physical ills. And the 
deeper one feels the joys of friendship with in- 
dividual small folk of the jungle, the more diffi- 
cult it is to convey them to others. And so it is 
not of the tropical mammal coati-mundi, nor even 
of the humorous Kib that I think, but of the soul 
of him galloping up and down his slanting log, 
of his little inner ego, which changed from a wild 
thing to one who would hurl himself from any 
height or distance into a lap, confident that we 
would save his neck, welcome him, and waste 
good time playing the game which he invented, of 
seeing whether we could touch his little cold snout 
before he hid it beneath his curved arms. 
So, in spite of my resolves, our bamboo groves 
became the homes of numerous little souls of wild 
folk, whose individuality shone out and domi- 
